Underpasses added to track redesign list

Council urges Palo Alto to narrow down list of alternatives, not expand it

PALO ALTO >> With Caltrain expected to expand service in Palo Alto over the next decade, the council is considering more proposals on how to separate tracks that intersect with busy city streets.

City officials plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the next several years to keep Caltrain service from forcing traffic to stop at four city roads: Charleston Road, Meadow Road, Churchill Avenue and Palo Alto Avenue.

On Tuesday, council members voted unanimously to include two of the three proposed additions to the grade separation list, including an option to build underpasses at Charleston Road and Meadow Road as well as a uniquely tailored intersection at Churchill Avenue, which hundreds of Palo Alto residents signed a petition to close instead.

The council rejected the third option to completely revamp Embarcadero Road because its massive price tag would not have qualified it for funding from Measure B — the 30-year, half-cent countywide sales tax to enhance transit.

So far, the council has received nine proposals from an advisory panel, but none appears to be particularly appealing to residents, council members or city staffers.

For years now, cities up and down the Peninsula have had to pay consulting companies millions and set aside hundreds of hours of staff time to figure out how to separate traffic-clogged streets that intersect with Caltrain tracks.

Caltrain’s vision is to have a BART-like “show-up and go” service, taking passengers from San Francisco to Gilroy on trains that run at least every 15 minutes all day long. That means cities like Palo Alto must close the 41 at-grade crossings Caltrain needs for higher speed service and foot a large part of the bill so car traffic can bypass train tracks.

The plan to expand service is the transit authority’s answer to worsening traffic issues that have plagued an already congested corridor of the Bay Area and would represent a stark transformation from the currently sluggish com

muter line to a truly urban mass transit system.

Among the main controversies surrounding the three new options is whether the city will choose to build a viaduct that some residents say will be an eyesore, dig a trench for Caltrain that could be unworkable for high-speed trains or lower roads under the current rail grade which could be prohibitively expensive.

“I know there’s a lot of frustration that we’re adding ideas and not subtracting, but this is about quality,” said Nadia Naik, a member of the Expanded Community Advisory Panel that brought forward the new proposals to the council Tuesday.

Despite Naik’s calls for keeping the process slow and meticulous, council members Tuesday urged her and the advisory panel to narrow down ideas over the next several months to two per rail crossing, an effort to speed up a process that started 10 years ago and appears to be nowhere near finished as deadlines loom.

Worried about the potential for increased traffic on the already congested Embarcadero Road, some residents of Old Palo Alto and Southgate urged the council to adopt one proposal to build an underpass at Churchill Avenue instead of closing down the road to north-south traffic as hundreds of Palo Alto residents

have called for.

Those residents were joined by over a dozen others.

Uncomfortable with either option currently proposed for Churchill Avenue, Palo Alto resident Michael Chacon said the new proposal approved by council members Tuesday would “bisect the city.” He also called a plan for a viaduct to tower over residential streets “unsightly,” “financially untenable” and “not very Palo Alto.”

Young-Jeh Oh, who supports the plan to close down Churchill Avenue, said the underpass option is “mainly motivated by those residents of Southgate who want to have access to Alma Road and save a few minutes on their commute” and asked the council not to add new options to the list, especially when so many residents support closing Churchill down.

“It will disfigure the neighborhood and become a permanent eyesore forever for those who have come to love this neighborhood,” Oh said of both current plans for Churchill Avenue.

But some in the public and on the council felt good about a proposal to turn Charleston Road and Meadow Road into a constant-flow street with a roundabout for U-turns, a concept similar to those found in Europe.

“This is the one I can see happening,” said Council member Liz Kniss.

Calling it the “Italian plan,” Vice Mayor Tom DuBois and his colleagues supported the plan for its fiscal

responsibility and minimal impact on the train tracks. An underpass, council members said, would keep the city from costly boring or jacking under the tracks putting Caltrain’s lines at risk in operating an everyday line.

“I appreciate the filter; you didn’t come back with a billion-dollar idea,” DuBois told members of the advisory panel. “You filtered on cost-effectiveness. I do hope

that staff and the consultant will take these as nuggets of ideas to see how we can make this work.”

Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions city staffers can’t answer.

When asked by Council member Eric Filseth whether spending four more months on alternatives — to the tune of $65,000 per new option analysis paid to the city’s consultant AECOM — will yield more details on the feasibility of these projects, City Manager Ed Shikada said he didn’t know.

“Quite frankly, we may not ,” Shikada said. “Those decisions are made much further down the design path. This poses a challenge for us to see what clarity and response we can get. Based on concept discussions, it’s a question of what level of assurance Caltrain will feel it’s ready to give.”